GIF inventor made few rich, but billions happy

Unisys

24/03/2022 15:02

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.  The opinions
expressed are his own.)
    By John Foley
    NEW YORK, March 24 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The internet
creates world-changing technologies and unimaginable fortunes –
just not always at the same time. Stephen Wilhite, the inventor
of the Graphics Interchange Format, who died on March 14 https://www.npr.org/2022/03/23/1088410133/gif-creator-dead-steve-wilhite-kathaleen-wife-interview,
 created a method of sharing color images that is now ubiquitous
thanks to social networks like Twitter  TWTR.N  and Reddit. But
the patents expired, and so did Wilhite’s employer CompuServe.
That makes the GIF one of technology’s great examples of
accidental philanthropy.
    Wilhite cooked up a memory-efficient way of transferring
color images in 1987, powered by a compression algorithm called
Lempel-Ziv-Welch. As browser pioneer Netscape made the internet
mainstream, GIFs and the looped animations they enabled websites
to incorporate became a de-facto standard. But when CompuServe
was acquired by AOL in 1998, the patents expired. Unisys
 UIS.N , owner of the LZW algorithm, collected some fees https://web.archive.org/web/20070207110047/http:/lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/unisys.html
 from the use of GIFs for a while, but its patents expired too
by 2004.
    These days there are smoother, more efficient alternatives
to the GIF. Yet the format is still ubiquitous, thanks mostly to
smartphones. Memes built on GIFs have amused billions, from
dancing bananas https://giphy.com/explore/dancing-banana to
Homer Simpson
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/homer-simpson-backs-into-bush
es backing into a bush. The name – pronounced, according to
Wilhite, with a soft “g” – is even applied to video clips that
aren’t really GIFs at all. The word was Oxford English
Dictionary’s word of the year
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oxford-university-press
-announces-gif-as-2012-word-of-the-year-179019921.html in 2012,
beating runners-up “Eurogeddon” and “Nomophobia.”
    And who got rich from this global success story? Almost
nobody. While Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen remains a
Silicon Valley power broker, the GIF is mostly a story of
business failure. CompuServe was effectively shut down in 2009,
and its remains ended up in telecoms giant Verizon
Communications  VZ.N . Unisys, worth $10.2 billion in 2000
according to Datastream, has a market capitalization of $1.4
billion now. Wilhite died, according to his obituary https://www.megiefuneralhome.com/obituaries/Stephen-E.-Wilhite?obId=24311617#,
 “a very humble, kind, and good man.”
    Wilhite isn’t the only one to develop a technology whose
value vastly outstrips its creators’ rewards. Tim Berners-Lee,
the inventor of the World Wide Web, effectively gave away his
creation for free – although he sold a non-fungible token https://www.reuters.com/technology/world-wide-web-source-code-nft-sells-54-million-sothebys-2021-06-30
 representing ownership of the original source code last year
for $5.4 million. While surging stock-market valuations have
created billionaires like Facebook  FB.O  founder Mark
Zuckerberg and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, the internet remains
a place where popularity and profit don’t always come together.

    Follow @johnsfoley https://twitter.com/johnsfoley on Twitter
    
    CONTEXT NEWS
    - Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF file format, died
on March 14 due to complications from Covid-19, NPR reported on
March 23.
    - Wilhite created the GIF while working for CompuServe in
1987, as a memory-efficient way to share color image files.
    - CompuServe, one of the early providers of internet
services, was ultimately acquired by Verizon, and effectively
shut down in 2009.

 (Editing by Robert Cyran and Pranav Kiran)
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